Category: Dissecting Reality

In the annals of crime, crime fiction, and crime news stories even to this day is the phrase killed when cleaning the gun. What this refers to is the after-the-fact explanation for how the father, friend, brother, mother, and sometimes the self, got shot. Because when you shoot somebody out of intent but you don’t want to get caught and be put away to prison, our society of laws does require that you come up with some sort of explanation. And cleaning your gun has long been an explanation or alibi for killing somebody.

In newspapers from 1871 to 2020 is a slowly rising, then falling, clump of instances of this phrase. The phrase slowly rises in the 1910 to 1913 era, drops in the 1920s, then rises sharply throughout the 1940s, with the mother of all peaks being from 1942 to 1945. The peak makes sense because 1942 to 1945 matches the years of World War II. The popularity of this phrase last has a heyday in the late 1960s, then drops and has been slowly dropping ever since.

What I find so curious about this alibi is that, except for true gun fanciers, who actually cleans their gun? Among the millions of people who keep their gun under the bed or on a top shelf of a closet, amateur gun owners who have them for protection, how many sit down and clean the thing?

Killed when cleaning gun sounds like a wink-wink-nod phrase that humans treat as acceptable for killing somebody else, much like when you show up to a work meeting late and tell people that it was the traffic or your child. None of us really believes it, but some type of excuse needs to be said.

It’s still used to this day, and successfully. In November 2019, Eric Rosenbrock of Lake George, New York, was sentenced to 5 years of probation for shooting his wife Ashley Rosenbrock in the chest. Ashley was killed when her husband was assembling his Walther 9 mm semi-automatic, loaded with a magazine, in preparation for a hunting trip.

Casting aspirations on the killed when cleaning gun explanation doesn’t mean that this never happens. Rosenbrock’s story was fully accepted, with the judge essentially chiding him for making a mistake. Even Ashley’s mother Lorraine Tefft was on board with the unintended homicide part of this incident, though she expressed anger at Eric Rosenbrock’s error. By all accounts, Eric and Ashley Rosenbrock had no issues, nothing to indicate that he would want to murder her.

Local news is in shambles, no doubt about that. Hyper-local newspapers are either struggling or no longer exist. In my community, the hyper-local newspaper survives only by running what feels like 90-percent ads and 10-percent news.

Since robots build our cars and electronics, can they build our local news? That’s what Hoodline, a news aggregator, says.

But take a look at this recent view of Hoodline’s Seattle news. Crime is going up and down all at the same time. We’ve entered some kind of alternate reality of separate, often conflicting, worlds:

To be accurate, one story refers to Seattle crime during the week of September 5, 2019 and the other one refers to the previous week. So, technically correct.

But from the human angle, where a human is the one receiving the information, it all feels a bit off-kilter. Words and phrases like “going up,” “dropping,” and especially “trend,” feel larger than they really are. How can such sweeping “trends” happen all at the same time? It doesn’t help that both stories, butted up against each other, use the same hero image and the same boilerplate text, only with time-relevant data changed.

Yes, it’s easy to mock CEO Razmig Hovaghimian and his Mission District crew as being out-of-touch techies, but where else will hyper-local news come from? Yahoo’s Patch looked good for awhile but now appears to have mainly folded or automated. Hoodline pulls together what Hovaghimian likes to call data signals from all sorts of places such as Facebook, Twitter, crime reporting sites, and others to fill in news deserts. It’s not a bad thing entirely. Maybe a little more human intervention?

The Los Angeles Times continues its descent into tabloid world with the headline on this article about the conviction of e-waste recycler Eric Lundgren: “Electronics-recycling innovator is going to prison for trying to extend computers’ lives.” Really? That’s shocking.

Because the Times pulled the article from the Washington Post due to some apparent content-sharing arrangement, I checked the Post’s headlines:

Can You Go to Prison for Extending Computers’ Lives?

According to the Times, extending the lives of computers is a crime. While Lundgren should not be in Federal prison in Sheridan, Oregon for 15 months, in my opinion, no one is going to prison anytime soon for extending computers’ lives. This is about counterfeiting and copyright violations.

From the Microsoft blog post about this:

Clifford Lundgren pled guilty to conspiring to traffic in counterfeit goods, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2320(a)(1), and criminal copyright infringement, in violation of 17 U.S.C. § 506(a)(1)(A) and 18 U.S.C. § 2319(a) and (b)(1). Lundgren’s plea related to his role in a scheme in which he created and intended to sell about 28,000 copies of Dell reinstallation discs for Microsoft Windows, without permission from Microsoft. Lundgren appeals his sentence of 15-months imprisonment. He argues the district court erred in calculating the value of the infringed item, which drove his guideline range, and that his sentence is substantively unreasonable as a result.

Lesson #1 of YouTube captioning:  don’t rely on automatic captioning.  But the mighty media empire behind The Young Turks couldn’t hire someone from Fiverr to vet the automatic captioning, thus saving Miss Kasparian from the indignity of uttering “balls deep” instead of the Hepatitus C drug Solvaldi?

The Ball Quantity Discussion

But it was only one ball, just a single ball, that was deep, you say.  Be accurate, man!  Yes, yes:  one ball only.  But whoever heard that?